DOCSLIB.ORG

Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South +(,121/,1( Citation: 108 Yale L.J. 1998-1999 Content downloaded/printed from HeinOnline (http://heinonline.org) Thu Feb 19 18:36:03 2009 -- Your use of this HeinOnline PDF indicates your acceptance of HeinOnline's Terms and Conditions of the license agreement available at http://heinonline.org/HOL/License -- The search text of this PDF is generated from uncorrected OCR text. -- To obtain permission to use this article beyond the scope of your HeinOnline license, please use: https://www.copyright.com/ccc/basicSearch.do? &operation=go&searchType=0 &lastSearch=simple&all=on&titleOrStdNo=0044-0094 Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South Ariela J. Grosst CONTENTS I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 111 II. THE SHIFTING ESSENCES OF RACE IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOUTH ................................................................................................. 123 A . Racial Knowledge ........................................................................ 124 B. Evidence and Essences ................................................................. 132 1. A bby Guy ............................................................................... 133 2. Race as Physical Marker....................................................... 137 3. Race as Documented Ancestry ............................................... 141 4. Race as Ascriptive Identity: Reputation, Associations, and Reception in Society ............................................................... 147 5. The Rise of Race as Science and Performance...................... 151 IH. PERFORMING WHITENESS ................................................................... 156 t Associate Professor of Law, University of Southern California. I am indebted to Scott Altman, Jody Armour, Jacob Cogan, David Cruz, Mary Dudziak, Karen Dunn-Haley, Laura Edwards, Harry Elam, George Fredrickson, Ron Garet, Jon Goldman, Bob Gordon, Tom Green, Janet Halley, Leslie Harris, Hendrik Hartog, Greg Keating, Bill Nelson, Peggy Pascoe, Rick Pildes, Renee Romano, Mike Shapiro, Larry Simon, Dave Slawson, Nomi Stolzenberg, Eric Talley, Chris Waldrep, Wendy Wall, Ted White, and participants of the NYU Legal History Colloquium and of faculty colloquia at USC, UCLA, and Rutgers-Newark Law Schools for reading and commenting on drafts of this Article. Discussions at the Center for Feminist Research and the Faculty Women's Writing Group at USC helped to clarify my thinking. Peggy Pascoe generously provided the list of cases that began this research, and Anthony Kaye guided me to new sources. The archival research for this Article was generously supported by the USC Law School and the Zumberge Research and Innovation Fund at USC. Many librarians and archivists made this work possible; I thank in particular Charles Miller, Laura Cadra, and Corrin Gee of the USC Law Library; Charles Sherrill of the Tennessee State Archives; Norwood Kerr of the Alabama Department of Archives and History; Marie Windell of the Earl K. Long Library at the University of New Orleans; Nicky Sherman of the Pulaski County, Arkansas Law Library; Ann Webster of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History; and Mark Stone of the Kentucky State Archives. Bill D'Angelo, Sonya Springer, Karin Lewicki, Debra Mayfield, and Rebecca Wolff provided valuable research assistance. HeinOnline -- 108 Yale L.J. 109 1998-1999 110 The Yale Law Journal [Vol. 108: 109 A . Performing W hite Manhood ......................................................... 158 B . Performing W hite W omanhood .................................................... 166 IV . CONCLUSION ....................................................................................... 177 A . PostwarContinuities .................................................................... 177 B . Trials, Law, and Performance ...................................................... 180 C. Law, Race, and Racism Today ..................................................... 181 APPENDIX .................................................................................................. 186 HeinOnline -- 108 Yale L.J. 110 1998-1999 19981 Litigating Whiteness I. INTRODUCTION In April of 1855, Abby Guy sued William Daniel in the Circuit Court for Ashley County, Arkansas, complaining that he held her and her children unfairly in slavery despite the fact that she was white.' The trial was held in the small town of Hamburg's brand-new courthouse, no doubt drawing spectators from all over the county to witness the dramatic determination of Guy's racial status.2 After Guy won her case, William Daniel appealed it to the state supreme court, and it was tried again in a neighboring county before she finally prevailed in the Arkansas Supreme Court on the eve of the Civil War. At the two trials, jurors watched Guy and her children display themselves for inspection, read documents of sale and a will, and listened to the opinions and descriptions of medical experts and witnesses from several counties. Witnesses testified about Guy's appearance, her reception in society, her conduct, her self-presentation, and her inherited status. In each case, the judge left the question of "race" for the jury to decide, because the jury represented the community consensus Trials like Abby Guy's, at which the central issue became the determination of a person's racial identity, were a regular occurrence in Southern county courts in the nineteenth century. While nineteenth-century white Southerners may have believed in a racial "essence" inhering in one's blood,4 there was no agreement about how to discover it. Legal determinations of race could not simply reflect community consensus, because there was no consensus to reflect. Despite the efforts of legislatures to reduce racial identities to a binary system, and of judges to insist that determining race was a matter of common sense, Southern communities 1. Transcript of Trial, Daniel v. Guy, No. 4109 (Ark. Ashley County Cir. Ct. July 1855) (collection of Pulaski County Law Library, Little Rock, Ark., Ark. Supreme Court Records & Briefs), rev'd in part, 19 Ark. 121 (1857), aff'd after remand, 23 Ark. 50 (1861) [hereinafter Transcript of Trial, Daniel v. Guy]. 2. Ashley County was first settled in the 1830s and established as a county in 1848. The courthouse was built in 1854. The April term of 1855 was probably the first term of the circuit court held in the new courthouse. See REFLECTIONS OF ASHLEY COUNTY 73 (Robert A. Carpenter, Sr. & Mary Imogene Noble Carpenter comp., 1988). 3. It is strildng how much discretion judges gave juries to decide racial status, given the frequent use during this period of legal presumptions to take control from the jury. While presumptions based on appearance governed slave or free status, they were always held to be rebuttable, and no presumptions governed racial status itself. The major treatises on presumptions and the law of evidence more generally made no mention of racial determination. See, e.g., JOHN D. LAWSON, THE LAW OF PRESUMPTIVE EVIDENCE (1886); JOHN H. MATHEWS, A TREATISE ON THE DOCTRINE OF PRESUMPTION AND PRESUMPTIVE EVIDENCE (1830). 4. For a discussion of the rhetoric of "blood" with regard to race in 19th-century antimiscegenation law, see Eva Saks, Representing Miscegenation Law, RARITAN, Fall 1988, at 39. HeinOnline -- 108 Yale L.J. 111 1998-1999 The Yale Law Journal [Vol. 108:109 harbored disagreement, suspicion, and conflict-not only over who was black and who was white, but over how to make such determinations at all.' By examining the kinds of evidence witnesses and litigants brought forth at trial, I hope to suggest that law, broadly defined, played an important role in constituting the cultural meaning of racial identities. In this Article, I argue that, over the course of the antebellum period, law made the "performance" of whiteness increasingly important to the determination of racial status.6 Doing the things a white man or woman did became the law's working definition of what it meant to be white.7 This 5. Of course, trial records necessarily reveal much more about the racial ideology of the Southern whites than that of people of color, because whites controlled the courts, composed the juries, and gave most of the testimony. It is beyond the scope of this Article to investigate the ideology of "color" of people of color in the 19th century, although I am pursuing this research elsewhere. My preliminary findings based on other records of ex-slaves and free people of color suggest that they exhibited no more agreement than did the white "community" over racial identities. Werner Sollors touches on many issues regarding "mulattoes" and racial identity in his study of "interracial literature" by black authors. See WERNER SOLLORS, NEITHER BLACK NOR WHITE YET BOTH: THEMATIC EXPLORATIONS OF INTERRACIAL LITERATURE (1997). 6. On courts as sites of performance, see generally CONTESTED STATES: LAW, HEGEMONY AND RESISTANCE (Mindie Lazarus-Black & Susan F. Hirsch eds., 1994) [hereinafter CONTESTED STATES]. I follow Judith Butler in my use of the notion of performativity. See JUDITH BUTLER, BODIES THAT MATIER: ON THE DISCURSIVE LIMITS OF "SEX" 1-23, 167-242 (1993) [hereinafter BUTLER, BODIES THAT MATTER]; JUDITH BUTLER, GENDER TROUBLE: FEMINISM AND THE SUBVERSION OF IDENTITY 128-141 (1990). Academic studies of "performance" draw on "two quite different discourses, that of theater on the one hand, of speech-act theory and
Load more

Recommended publications
  • The Politics of Ambiguity Conditional Manumission, Labor Contracts, and Slave Emancipation in Brazil (1850S–1888)*
    Sidney Chalhoub The Politics of Ambiguity Conditional Manumission, Labor Contracts, and Slave Emancipation in Brazil (1850s–1888)* Introduction The historical process that made liberalism, old and new, the guiding ideology of Western societies brought with it the invention of new forms of unfree labor. Lib- eralism and free labor, ancien regime and serfdom and/or slavery are no longer unproblematic pairs of historical intelligibility. The first half of the nineteenth century did not see the weakening of slavery in the Americas at all, but just the partial relocation of it. The institution of slavery gradually disappeared in the British and French Caribbean while it became stronger in Brazil, Cuba, and the US South.1 In the second half of the nineteenth century, as the nightmare of an international order based on slavery was finally defeated in the American Civil War,2 there emerged extremely aggressive racist ideologies that justified Western imperial expansion and the persistence of forced labor in Africa and elsewhere. Actually, it boggles the mind to think that for so long it seemed possible to con- ceive of the nineteenth century as a time of transition from slavery to freedom, from bondage to contractual and/or free labor. In fact, contract labor, however diverse in its forms, was often thought of as a form of coerced labor, with workers * This article was first published under the same title in International Review of Social History, Vol. 60 (2015), pp. 161–191 doi:10.1017/S0020859015000176 © 2015 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission.
    [Show full text]
  • Indentured Servants, Slaves, and Articles of Commerce, The
    Missouri Law Review Volume 61 Issue 4 Fall 1996 Article 1 Fall 1996 Struggle over Immigration: Indentured Servants, Slaves, and Articles of Commerce, The Mary Sarah Bilder Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Mary Sarah Bilder, Struggle over Immigration: Indentured Servants, Slaves, and Articles of Commerce, The, 61 MO. L. REV. (1996) Available at: https://scholarship.law.missouri.edu/mlr/vol61/iss4/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Law Journals at University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Missouri Law Review by an authorized editor of University of Missouri School of Law Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Bilder: Bilder: Struggle over Immigration: MISSOURI LAW REVIEW VOLUME 61 FALL 1996 NUMBER 4 The Struggle over Immigration: Indentured Servants, Slaves, and Articles of Commerce Mary Sarah Bilder" A long time ago, but not too long ago, Ships came from across the sea Bringing Pilgrims and prayer-makers, Adventurers and booty seekers, Free men and indentured servants, Slave men and slave masters, all new- To a new world, America! -Langston Hughes' * Assistant Professor of Law, Boston College Law School. B.A. 1987, University of Wisconsin-Madison; J.D. 1990, Harvard Law School; A.M. (History) 1992, Harvard University. I thank Bernard Bailyn, Daniel Coquillette, Anthony Farley, Phyllis Goldfarb, Daniel Kanstroom, Ray Madoff, John T. O'Keefe, Aviam Soifer, and Carol Weisbrod. Above all, I thank my parents, Richard and Sally Bilder, for their advice and encouragement.
    [Show full text]
  • Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States
    Historical Origins of the One-Drop Racial Rule in the United States Winthrop D. Jordan1 Edited by Paul Spickard2 Editor’s Note Winthrop Jordan was one of the most honored US historians of the second half of the twentieth century. His subjects were race, gender, sex, slavery, and religion, and he wrote almost exclusively about the early centuries of American history. One of his first published articles, “American Chiaroscuro: The Status and Definition of Mulattoes in the British Colonies” (1962), may be considered an intellectual forerunner of multiracial studies, as it described the high degree of social and sexual mixing that occurred in the early centuries between Africans and Europeans in what later became the United States, and hinted at the subtle racial positionings of mixed people in those years.3 Jordan’s first book, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812, was published in 1968 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement era. The product of years of painstaking archival research, attentive to the nuances of the thousands of documents that are its sources, and written in sparkling prose, White over Black showed as no previous book had done the subtle psycho-social origins of the American racial caste system.4 It won the National Book Award, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Parkman Prize, and other honors. It has never been out of print since, and it remains a staple of the graduate school curriculum for American historians and scholars of ethnic studies. In 2005, the eminent public intellectual Gerald Early, at the request of the African American magazine American Legacy, listed what he believed to be the ten most influential books on African American history.
    [Show full text]
  • The Woman-Slave Analogy: Rhetorical Foundations in American
    The Woman-Slave Analogy: Rhetorical Foundations in American Culture, 1830-1900 Ana Lucette Stevenson BComm (dist.), BA (HonsI) A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at The University of Queensland in 2014 School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics I Abstract During the 1830s, Sarah Grimké, the abolitionist and women’s rights reformer from South Carolina, stated: “It was when my soul was deeply moved at the wrongs of the slave that I first perceived distinctly the subject condition of women.” This rhetorical comparison between women and slaves – the woman-slave analogy – emerged in Europe during the seventeenth century, but gained peculiar significance in the United States during the nineteenth century. This rhetoric was inspired by the Revolutionary Era language of liberty versus tyranny, and discourses of slavery gained prominence in the reform culture that was dominated by the American antislavery movement and shared among the sisterhood of reforms. The woman-slave analogy functioned on the idea that the position of women was no better – nor any freer – than slaves. It was used to critique the exclusion of women from a national body politic based on the concept that “all men are created equal.” From the 1830s onwards, this analogy came to permeate the rhetorical practices of social reformers, especially those involved in the antislavery, women’s rights, dress reform, suffrage and labour movements. Sarah’s sister, Angelina, asked: “Can you not see that women could do, and would do a hundred times more for the slave if she were not fettered?” My thesis explores manifestations of the woman-slave analogy through the themes of marriage, fashion, politics, labour, and sex.
    [Show full text]
  • Than Segregation, Racial Identity: the Neglected Question in Plessy V
    Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice Volume 10 | Issue 1 Article 3 Spring 4-1-2004 MORE THAN SEGREGATION, RACIAL IDENTITY: THE NEGLECTED QUESTION IN PLESSY V. FERGUSON Thomas J. Davis Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj Part of the Civil Rights and Discrimination Commons, and the Legal History Commons Recommended Citation Thomas J. Davis, MORE THAN SEGREGATION, RACIAL IDENTITY: THE NEGLECTED QUESTION IN PLESSY V. FERGUSON, 10 Wash. & Lee Race & Ethnic Anc. L. J. 1 (2004). Available at: https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/crsj/vol10/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice at Washington & Lee University School of Law Scholarly Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Washington and Lee Journal of Civil Rights and Social Justice by an authorized editor of Washington & Lee University School of Law Scholarly Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. MORE THAN SEGREGATION, RACIAL IDENTITY: THE NEGLECTED QUESTION IN PLESSY V. FERGUSON Thomas J. Davis* I. INTRODUCTION The U.S. Supreme Court's 1896 decision in Plessy v. Ferguson' has long stood as an ignominious marker in U.S. law, symbolizing the nation's highest legal sanction for the physical separation by race of persons in the United States. In ruling against thirty-four-year-old New Orleans shoemaker Homer Adolph Plessy's challenge to Louisiana's Separate Railway Act of 1890,2 the Court majority declared that we think the enforced separation of the races, as applied to the internal commerce of the state, neither abridges the privileges or immunities of the colored man, deprives him of his property without due process of law, nor denies him the equal protection of the laws, within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.3 One commentator on the Court's treatment of African-American civil rights cast the Plessy decision as "the climactic Supreme Court pronouncement on segregated institutions."4 Historian C.
    [Show full text]
  • A Study of West African Slave Resistance from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries
    History in the Making Volume 1 Article 7 2008 A Study of West African Slave Resistance from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries Adam D. Wilsey CSUSB Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/history-in-the-making Part of the African History Commons Recommended Citation Wilsey, Adam D. (2008) "A Study of West African Slave Resistance from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries," History in the Making: Vol. 1 , Article 7. Available at: https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/history-in-the-making/vol1/iss1/7 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Arthur E. Nelson University Archives at CSUSB ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in History in the Making by an authorized editor of CSUSB ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. 78 CSUSB Journal of History A Study of West African Slave Resistance from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries Adam D. Wiltsey Linschoten, South and West Africa, Copper engraving (Amsterdam, 1596.) Accompanying the dawn of the twenty‐first century, there has emerged a new era of historical thinking that has created the need to reexamine the history of slavery and slave resistance. Slavery has become a controversial topic that historians and scholars throughout the world are reevaluating. In this modern period, which is finally beginning to honor the ideas and ideals of equality, slavery is the black mark of our past; and the task now lies History in the Making 79 before the world to derive a better understanding of slavery. In order to better understand slavery, it is crucial to have a more acute awareness of those that endured it.
    [Show full text]
  • From African to African American: the Creolization of African Culture
    From African to African American: The Creolization of African Culture Melvin A. Obey Community Services So long So far away Is Africa Not even memories alive Save those that songs Beat back into the blood... Beat out of blood with words sad-sung In strange un-Negro tongue So long So far away Is Africa -Langston Hughes, Free in a White Society INTRODUCTION When I started working in HISD’s Community Services my first assignment was working with inner city students that came to us straight from TYC (Texas Youth Commission). Many of these young secondary students had committed serious crimes, but at that time they were not treated as adults in the courts. Teaching these young students was a rewarding and enriching experience. You really had to be up close and personal with these students when dealing with emotional problems that would arise each day. Problems of anguish, sadness, low self-esteem, disappointment, loneliness, and of not being wanted or loved, were always present. The teacher had to administer to all of these needs, and in so doing got to know and understand the students. Each personality had to be addressed individually. Many of these students came from one parent homes, where the parent had to work and the student went unsupervised most of the time. In many instances, students were the victims of circumstances beyond their control, the problems of their homes and communities spilled over into academics. The teachers have to do all they can to advise and console, without getting involved to the extent that they lose their effectiveness.
    [Show full text]
  • (In)Determinable: Race in Brazil and the United States
    Michigan Journal of Race and Law Volume 14 2009 Determining the (In)Determinable: Race in Brazil and the United States D. Wendy Greene Cumberland School fo Law at Samford University Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl Part of the Comparative and Foreign Law Commons, Education Law Commons, Law and Race Commons, and the Law and Society Commons Recommended Citation D. W. Greene, Determining the (In)Determinable: Race in Brazil and the United States, 14 MICH. J. RACE & L. 143 (2009). Available at: https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol14/iss2/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Michigan Journal of Race and Law by an authorized editor of University of Michigan Law School Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. DETERMINING THE (IN)DETERMINABLE: RACE IN BRAZIL AND THE UNITED STATES D. Wendy Greene* In recent years, the Brazilian states of Rio de Janeiro, So Paulo, and Mato Grasso du Sol have implemented race-conscious affirmative action programs in higher education. These states established admissions quotas in public universities '' for Afro-Brazilians or afrodescendentes. As a result, determining who is "Black has become a complex yet important undertaking in Brazil. Scholars and the general public alike have claimed that the determination of Blackness in Brazil is different than in the United States; determining Blackness in the United States is allegedly a simpler task than in Brazil. In Brazil it is widely acknowledged that most Brazilians are descendants of Aficans in light of the pervasive miscegenation that occurred during and after the Portuguese and Brazilian enslavement of * Assistant Professor of Law, Cumberland School of Law at Samford University.
    [Show full text]
  • Convict Servitude, Authority, and the Rise of Humanitarianism in the Anglo-American World, 1718-1809
    ABSTRACT THE “VILE COMMODITY”: CONVICT SERVITUDE, AUTHORITY, AND THE RISE OF HUMANITARIANISM IN THE ANGLO-AMERICAN WORLD, 1718-1809 Nicole K. Dressler, Ph.D. Department of History Northern Illinois University, 2018 Aaron S. Fogleman, Director This dissertation examines the role that British convict transportation and penal servitude in America played in the early history of humanitarianism. During the eighteenth century, Britons and American’s ideas about moral obligations and suffering changed drastically toward traditionally detested people, including transported convicts, African slaves, sailors, and the poor. Many histories of humanitarianism and human rights have glazed over the subject’s early modern roots; however, more recently scholars have challenged the unilinear and inevitably triumphal narrative of human rights cultures and launched new investigations into the historical foundations of the movement. This study argues that emerging ideas of punishment, morality, and unfreedom evoked by convict labor created new moral responsibilities, widened the plane of sympathies, and inspired novel denunciations of suffering in eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century Anglo-American culture. It uses legal and judicial records, public commentaries, and the papers of prominent reformers in London and the three colonies (later states) that imported the most convicts on the North American mainland, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. It traces the attitudes, ethics, and practices regarding penal servitude from 1718, following a new British law that ushered in an era of massive convict transportation, through the American Revolution and into the early Republic period. The study shows how labor systems as a whole played an unrecognized, critical role and influenced early modern abolitionist and moralist thinking and rhetoric.
    [Show full text]
  • Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; a Literary Weapon
    PEOPLE’S DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF ALGERIA Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research University of Tlemcen Faculty of Letters and Languages Department of English Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; a Literary Weapon Against Slavery Dissertation submitted to the Department of English as a partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Literature and Civilization Presented by Supervised by Ms.Tasnim BELAIDOUNI Ms.Meriem MENGOUCHI BOARD OF EXAMINERS Dr. Wassila MOURO Chairwoman Ms. Meriem MENGOUCHI Supervisor Dr. Frid DAOUDI Examiner Academic Year: 2016/2017 Dedications To those who believed in me To those who helped me through hard times To my Mother, my family and my friends I dedicate this work ii Acknowledgements Immense loads of gratitude and thanks are addressed to my teacher and supervisor Ms. Meriem MENGOUCHI; this work could have never come to existence without your vivacious guidance, constant encouragement, and priceless advice and patience. My sincerest acknowledgements go to the board of examiners namely; Dr. Wassila MOURO and Dr. Frid DAOUDI My deep gratitude to all my teachers iii Abstract Harriet Ann Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl seemed not to be the only literary work which tackled the issue of woman in slavery. However, this autobiography is the first published slave narrative written in the nineteenth century. In fact, the primary purpose of this research is to dive into Incidents in order to examine the author’s portrayal of a black female slave fighting for her freedom and her rights. On the other hand, Jacobs shows that despite the oppression and the persecution of an enslaved woman, she did not remain silent, but she strived to assert herself.
    [Show full text]
  • Check One Box: Reconsidering Directive No. 15 and the Classification of Mixed-Race People
    Check One Box: Reconsidering Directive No. 15 and the Classification of Mixed-Race People Kenneth E. Paysont INTRODUCTION "What are you?" As the child of a Japanese mother and a White father, I have often been asked this question.' While I am also male, heterosexual, law student, spouse, sibling, and child, this query is usually directed at my racial identity. As a mixed-race person, I am part of an ill-defined, amorphous group of persons who are increasingly becoming the subject of private and public scrutiny. As one commen- tator quipped, one "cannot turn on 'Oprah' without seeing a segment on multiraciality . ."' The simple question "What are you?" illus- trates the fundamental role race plays in defining our relationships with others. When faced with ambiguous morphology, we seek clarification of another's racial identity so that we may begin defining our Copyright © 1996 California Law Review, Inc. t Law clerk to the Honorable Barbara Durham, Chief Justice, Washington Supreme Court. J.D. 1996, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. I would like to thank Professor Rachel Moran for her patience, insight, and encouragement. I would also like to thank Professors Robert Chang, Jewelle Taylor Gibbs, Angela Harris, and Marina Hsieh for their thoughtful feedback. Lastly, I would like to thank the editors and staff of the CaliforniaLaw Review for all their hard work. This Comment is dedicated to my wife, Monica, for her unfailing love and support. 1. I evidently appear racially ambiguous, having at various times been identified by others as Asian, Latino, American Indian or African-American.
    [Show full text]
  • Essay for Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument by Kate Clifford Larsen
    From: Kate Clifford Larson, Ph.D. To: Cherie Butler, Superintendant, HATU; Aiden Smith, OAH Date: January 15, 2014 RE: HATU National Monument Scholars Roundtable White Paper Response In November 2013, the National Park Service invited five scholars to Dorchester County, Maryland to participate in a roundtable discussion about interpretation of Harriet Tubman’s life and legacy for the newly established Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument.1 Joining the scholars and NPS professionals, were representatives from Maryland Department of Natural Resources, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge (BNWR), Maryland Department of Economic Development, the Organization of American Historians, local residents, and Haley Sharpe Design, the exhibit design firm. Initially guided by a set of questions framed by four themes - Building Communities, Anchoring the Spirit, Paths Toward Freedom and Resistance, and Sharing Knowledge - the discussion drew from the specialties and skill sets of each scholar, complimenting and enhancing each other’s ideas and perspectives while examining the core elements of Tubman’s life and legacy. One of the goals of the roundtable was to enhance NPS partnerships and collaborations with stakeholders and historians to ensure the incorporation of varied perspectives and views into innovative and challenging interpretation at NPS sites, particularly sites associated with controversial and emotionally charged subjects such as slavery and freedom at the Tubman National Monument. NPS, Maryland State Parks, and the Maryland
    [Show full text]